Artist Delicately Crafts Colorful Insects From Freshly Cut Flowers

Raku Inoue Insect Art Floral Arrangements

Stag Beetle

In his series, Natura Insects, Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue uses an assortment of freshly-cut blooms to create colorful insect sculptures. Each delicately crafted floral arrangement transforms the earthy creatures into ethereal works of art, exhibiting the artist’s creative use of materials and unexpected approach to his subject matter.

Natura Insects features 9 types of bugs, including delicate beetles, a radiant ladybug, and a beautiful butterfly. To create each winged creature, Inoue arranges a wide array of floral elements onto plain white paper. In order to add a pop of color to each creation, he uses vibrant petals. Other details—including legs, antennae, and even pincers—are creatively sculpted from other parts of a flower, including tiny leaves, fragile stems, and prematurely plucked buds.

By crafting the insects out of an alluring assortment of colorful flowers, Inoue cleverly alters the connotations attached to his subjects. Viewers are able to shed their pre-conceived perceptions of bugs as creepy-crawly creatures and, instead, view them as unique and aesthetically fascinating fauna.

In addition to blossoms and blooms, Inoue works with a range of experimental materials and unusual mediums. If you’d like to see more of his diverse body of work, you can follow him on Instagram.